The June sky outside her college room was as nearly as clear as her mind. The page was definitely as white as the solitary cloud slowly drifting along. The temperature as hot as the water she’d be in if she didn’t get her already extended assignment in on time.
Emma sat with her chin in her hand, in despair, flicking through the text for something she could quote. What could “Middlemarch” say to her broken heart? She loathed calm teenage Dorothea calmly marrying some old bloke without a care. Why? Hadn’t the blood rushed through her 19th century veins? Hadn’t she wanted to run and dance for no reason or cry or play loud music to scour her tortured soul?
Emma, looking out of the window in the hope of inspiration, caught sight of Harry and Izzy, snogging in front of the college greenhouse opposite her room. Tears welled up in Emma’s eyes, her throat ached. She hadn’t thought she could cry anymore. The two timing pig, that so called best friend.
Coming the other way, apparently straight at them was Emma’s English tutor, eyes closed, presumably quoting George Eliot to herself as she prepared to scatter any smooching students who dared to be in her way.
The room got hotter and the sky got suddenly darker, the cloud now filling the heavens before it opened in a tumult of enormous cascading hail stones. The roof on the greenhouse smashed, a massive hailstone caught the tutor on the back of her head and she skidded on the hail strewn path and fell unconscious off her bicycle, which slid sideways into Harry and Izzy who fell to the ground, the melting ice turning the path into mud smearing Izzy’s white clothes and ruining Harry’s carefully styled hair. They sat up and glared at each other, ignoring the unconscious lecturer.
Empty, the cloud dispersed and the sky was blue again, the sun beating down. The hail disappeared as if it had never been.
The only evidence, the shattered glass and the dazed trio on the ground, watched by their invisible observer.
Emma, tried not to smirk, but smirk she did and wiping the tears away opened the dreaded book again – her eyes falling on the words: “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

Copyright 2015 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission